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Housing & Economic Development <br />throughout the Metro Area; <br />• Maintaining the federal tax credit program to help spur construction and secure <br />additional private investment, including making the four percent Low Income Housing Tax <br />Credit a fixed rate as was done with the nine percent credit in 2015; <br />• Creating and implementing a more streamlined procedural method for local units of <br />government to participate in and access federal funding and services dealing with grants, <br />loans, and tax incentive programs for economic and community development efforts; <br />• Additional resources to assist communities to meet obligations to reduce barriers to <br />and promote fair housing and equal opportunity; <br />• Maintaining and increasing resources to Section 8 funding and to support incentives <br />for rental property owners to participate in the program; and <br />• Federal funding to provide short-term assistance for HRAs to facilitate the sale of tax- <br />exempt bonds. <br />3-1 Vacant, Boarded, and Foreclosed Properties and Properties at Risk <br />Abandoned residential and commercial properties can harm communities when vacant buildings <br />result in reduced property values and increased crime. The additional public safety and code <br />enforcement costs of managing vacant properties are a financial strain on cities. <br />Metro Cities supports solutions to vacant and boarded properties that recognize: (1) <br />Prevention is more cost effective than a cure. (2) The causes of this problem are many and <br />varied, thus the solutions must be as well. (3) It is not simply a "city" problem so cities <br />must not be expected to bear the bulk of the burden of mitigation. <br />Further, Metro Cities supports: <br />• Registration of vacant and boarded properties; <br />• Allowing cities to acquire vacant and boarded properties before deterioration and <br />vandalism result in unsalvageable structures; including providing financial tools such as <br />increasing eminent domain flexibility; <br />• Improvements to the cost assignment process to ensure that cities can recoup their <br />costs of managing vacant properties; <br />• Improving the ability of cities to recoup the increased public safety and enforcement <br />costs related to vacant properties; <br />• Improvement of the redemption process to provide increased notification to renters, <br />strengthen the ability of homeowners to retain their properties, and reduce the amount of <br />2018 Legislative Policies <br />26 <br />